Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Odds are, you didn't read about the 5.12 release outside of Ryan Paul's overview on Ars Technica. You see, Perl not being dead and just continuing business as usual doesn't make for compelling news. Also, let's admit, the Perl community has a great deal of competence in producing software, but couldn't market its way out of a soaking wet paper bag.

Interesting read over at ostatic.com, a guest piece by Jeff Hobbs. This topic is a proverbial discussion point in the perl community and has heated up quite a bit over the past year or two, "how to better market the awesomeness of perl?" It's hard to evangelize when we're busy getting stuff done. This article provides a nice collection of the arguments why 'perl is still relevant.'

Disclosure: ActiveState produces a professionally packaged perl for windows, so they are of course a bit biased into the pro-perl camp. (And they may be feeling some pressure from Vanilla perl now shipping a "normal" perl for windows).